November 18, 2009

32bit vs 64bit

Inspired by a friend who isn’t as big of a computer geek as I am, I decided to do a post explaining the differences between 32bit and 64bit when it comes to operating systems.

The 32 and 64 bit numbers actually refer to the maximum accessible address space that the OS and CPU can handle. In laymen terms, with a 32bit processor/Operating System you are limited to about 4294967296 bytes of space (232). If you convert that to Gigabytes you’re left with about 4gb (in reality that number is bit less). So in a 32 bit system the maximum amount of memory that your computer can successfully utilize is about 3.75GB. This means that even if you have 8GB of RAM in your machine, it will only be able to utilize 3.75GB. This is definitely something to keep in mind when you are picking up your next computer or looking to upgrade your current machine.

In a 64bit world (CPU/OS) you’re looking at significantly more address space. Since our number is actually growing exponentially instead of linearly (this isn’t really a math blog, but exponents grow exponentially whereas basic math modifiers (+ – / *) all grow linearly in repetitively applied) we are given about 17179869184GB of space. That is not a typo, it actually is 17 Billion Gigabytes. This means that your computer will read the full 8GB of RAM that you have in your machine.

The key when upgrading is to ensure that both your OS, CPU and Motherboard support 64bit processing. That isn’t really a problem now, but if you are dealing with a slightly older computer, it helps to look.

November 13, 2009

Feature Friday – David Walsh – When Webmasters Attack

David Walsh Blog is something that I’ve been following for some time now. While he predominantly focuses on Mootools related functionality (I’m jQuery) he does have some good posts about design and development on all aspects of the web. Definitely a website worth adding to your Feed list.

This particular post is something that I feel puts in perspective the problems of crowd-sourcing your way to success.

http://davidwalsh.name/when-webmasters-attack

November 11, 2009

Website Profiling with Fiddler

Recently I came upon the task of measuring performance in a corporate website. Generally when profiling I just pop open Google Chrome and run the Web Developer Tools that come pre-installed. It has a built in profiler that works and as a bonus looks really pretty. However, since this is a corporate setting, IE6 is used predominantly and therefore all my tests would have to be done with IE6.

After some research into the best profiling tools that work cross-browser I stumbled across a forum post talking about Fiddler. Fiddler is a complete network profiler, allowing to to monitor all network traffic. But it also gives you the ability to limit it to just browser traffic, which was idea in this case. Simply starting up Fiddler and hitting F12 started the capture process (alternatively, File -> Capture Traffic) and reloading the page captured all traffic. It lists all the items that were loaded on the page and lets you select any number or combination of them to get the total load time for those elements. This feature alone is great because it gives you an overview of all Javascript, or all image files. It even breaks down the distinction between .gif, .jpg and.png files so can see how they rate individually.

As an added bonus, Fiddler even generates charts to compare loading times based on the elements that you selected. This is a great way to provide a quick overview to prospective clients on where their website is slowing down and gives you a leg up in figuring out how to improve this. As a freelance consultant, tools like this really make things a lot easier and provide you with at-a-glance data freeing up your time to look at solutions instead of focusing on the problems.

One thing to note, I thought the Fiddler website looked a little shady, but it is completely legitimate and under active development.

fiddler2

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